Facebook Creates Rooftop QR Code That Does Not Work

There is a new craze of placing QR codes on the roof of your building to be seen by Google Maps. To join in, Facebook decided to launch a project and create their own 42 foot QR code on the roof of one of their buildings. The result can be seen below:

Facebook QR Code Roof FAIL

This QR code looks great, however, it does not scan properly with most QR code readers. All QR codes are required to have a 4 pixel white border known as the “quiet-zone” around the QR code. This helps the QR code reader to know where the QR code ends. Because of this, the QR code is difficult to be scanned by many QR code readers. For example, my QR code reader took rotating the phone and putting the two edges that touch the building into the corner of the QR code reader’s scannable area to be able to read this QR code.

So all in all, what can be learned from this is to always remember to put your 4 pixel white space when you paint a huge QR code on the roof of your building.

The Facebook QR Code Roof Project

It all started with Mark Zuckerburg, CEO of Facebook, announcing a “Space Hackathon”. The idea was to reinvent a space at the Facebook Headquarters. One of Facebook’s employees, Mark Pike, had an idea of putting a QR code on the roof that could be used to RickRoll people with epic proportions. The idea gained a lot of ground and went into planing. Facebook created a short URL for this QR code to allow for a smaller, simpler QR code. Building materials were also looked at and ultimately it was decided to just paint the QR code onto the roof.

At Hackathon 29, Facebook was able to gather up a bunch of engineers, designers and other to go up on the roof and create this QR code. Once finished, they used a camera attached to a remote control helicopter to take a photo of their work.

Read the entire story over on Facebook’s blog for more details to the story.

What Do You Think About This?

Post a comment below and tell us your thoughts on this project. Does it scan using your QR code reader?